"If you put a
spoonful of wine in a barrel of sewage, you get sewage.
If you put a spoonful of
sewage in a barrel full of wine, you get sewage."
~
Schopenhauer's Law of Entropy

TQM refers to an
integrated approach by management to focus all functions and levels of an
organization on →Quality and
→Continuous Improvement. Over the years TQM has become very important for
improving a firm's process capabilities in order to achieve fit and sustain
competitive advantages. TQM focuses on encouraging a continuous flow of
incremental improvements from the bottom of the organization's hierarchy. TQM is
not a complete solution formula as viewed by many
– formulas can
not solve managerial problems, but a lasting commitment to the process of
continuous improvement.

Pentel is a Japanese firm manufacturing stationary
products. The following is a list of 14 Pentel's slogans for explaining Total
Quality Management
(TQM) and
Quick and Easy Kaizen
philosophy to its employees.

When a company introduces something new,
such as
quality circles, or total quality management (TQM), it experiences
some initial success, but soon such success disappear like fireworks on
summer night and after a while nothing is left, and management keeps
looking for a new flavor of the month.

This if because the company lacks the first
three most important conditions for the successful introduction and
implementation of Kaizen strategy...
More

With TQM quality is not the product but the process. To institute the
process, corporate trainers must bring about a cultural transformation wherein all
employees shed their individualism for a unified set of
corporate values.

TQM was the brainchild
of Dr.
W. Edward Deming. TQM helped
Japan with its postwar economic
recovery. That was because it meshed with Japanese culture...

Quality is not just product related.
Quality is not just the product; it's a combination of the product and
"add-ons," i.e. packaging, availability, convenience of use and value
adding customer service, etc. The same applies to you in the
employment market. Possessing a tertiary qualification may only get you
50% of the way towards being internally promoted or externally employed.
The other 50% will depend upon what your acquired "add-ons" are, i.e.
what makes you more valuable than your competitor in the mind of
potential employers/customers. Ask yourself "what value adding
skills have I acquired and applied to my work within the past 2 years
that demonstrate skill flexibility, continuing career development and
quality as an employee?"...
More

Three Stages of the Suggestion
System

1. Encouragement. In the first stage,
management should make every effort to help the workers
provide suggestions,
no matter how primitive, for the
betterment of the worker's job and the workshop. This will help the workers
look at the way they are doing their jobs... More

In his
10 Rules for Building a
Business Success, Sam Walton,
the Founder of Wall-Mart advises: "Listen
to everyone in your company and figure out ways to get them talking. The
folks on the front lines –
the ones who actually talk to the customer –
are the only ones who really know what's going on out there. You'd better
find out what they know. This really is what total quality is all about. To
push responsibility down in your organization, and to
force good ideas to
bubble up within it, you must listen to what your associates are trying
to tell you."

TPS-Lean Six Sigma

TPS-Lean Six Sigma is like a ‘turbo-charged’ Lean Six Sigma program.TPS-Lean Six Sigma is a revolutionary, holistic
concept. It actively has human capital embedded in Lean Six Sigma in a
manner that not only stimulates commitment, integrity, work-life balance, passion,
enjoyment at work
and
employee engagement but also stimulates individual and team learning in
order to develop a motivated workforce and sustainable
performance improvement and quality
enhancement for the organization...
More

Cross-functional Management

Cross-functional management (CFM)
manages business processes across the traditional boundaries of the
functional areas. CFM relates to coordinating and synergizing
the activities of different units for realizing the superordinate
cross-functional goals and policy deployment. It is concerned with
building a better system for achieving such cross-functional goals as
innovation,
quality, cost, and delivery.

In Total Quality Management (TQM) and
Kaizen, the cross-functional goals of QCD (Quality, Cost, Delivery) are
clearly defined as superior to such line functions as planning, design,
production and sales...